The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference at the University ofWisconsin-Milwaukee is seeking submissions for a two-day graduate studentconference focusing on the theme "Archival Bodies" to be held on February10-11, 2006, in conjunction with the Center for 21st Century Studies and its2005-06 research theme "States of Autonomy."

The theme "Archival Bodies" draws its language from the work of keynote speakerWalid Raad, the founder of The Atlas Group, a project established "to locate,preserve, study, and produce audio, visual, literary and other artifacts thatshed light on the contemporary history of Lebanon." Raad will draw on this workin his mixed media presentation "The Loudest Muttering Is Over: Documents fromThe Atlas Group Archive."

The terms "archive" and "body" present opportunities for a wide range ofinterpretations of the phrase "archival bodies." While we anticipate diverseresponses to the conference theme, we are particularly interested in thepossible intersections and collisions of two major, or perhaps dominant,readings: specifically, (1) a collection, or corpus, of texts, and (2) theliving body in its capacity as an on-going and history-preserving repository ofevents, responses, and cultural signifiers.

The conference seeks to engage such topics as:

Autonomy written in and out of the body Bodily sites of memory and resistance Embodied histories and geographies Identity and its markers Race, gender, class, nation, sexuality as archival bodies The historical archive in the (pre-)digital age Roles of researcher, librarian, archivist Strategies of hierarchy, order, classification Canonical inclusions and exclusions Communities and collections Marked bodies and body modification Representing, reproducing, fictionalizing the body New media and film archives Archival residues of performance and everyday life Politics of preservation Bodily knowledge and structures of feeling

We encourage submissions that address ways of conceiving and critiquing the usesof archives in contemporary scholarship, particularly in relation to issues ofthe digital, the new media, film, and performance, as well as the reams ofpaper filling university libraries and private collections. More provocatively,though, we are interested in the ways the human body functions both as anarchive and in archival spaces. Taking up post-Cartesian conceptions of thebody, recent scholarship in the humanities and the human sciences has expressedan interest in and concern with questions of bodies and embodiment, suggestingthat embodied social and cultural signifiers--both the outward markings of race,sex, and age and the concealed traces of geography, class, education,sexuality--might provide significant locations for intellectual and politicalresearch. We are interested, then, in collections of "texts," in the broadestpossible sense of that term, whether they are located in a library or in ahuman body. This conference seeks submissions that broaden our understanding ofhow we act on archives and how they act on us.